Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
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We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
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Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.
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Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
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I love looking at famous people. Because of the way they look. Because of the way photography makes them look famous.
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The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
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Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.
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Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
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... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
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Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.
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Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
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Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.
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Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
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Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
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Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
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In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.
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To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world , and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason , this and nothing else is philosophy.
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Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
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I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
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Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.
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Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
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Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
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He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
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Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.